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Thursday, May 12, 2016

It Didn’t Start With Marx

An extraordinary book came my way, one which alters
to some degree my own focus on the current conflict between socialism and
conservatism, between secular political collectivism and religious political
collectivism in America. This is George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism, originally
published in 1998 and reissued in 2001. Then, as now, it is largely unheralded
by the doyens of socialism and conservatism. The book remains obscure for many
reasons, not least of which is that its contents are a revelation which current
socialists and egalitarians would prefer not become general knowledge.

Many of the unsavory roots of socialism, as
highlighted by Watson, are hardly complimentary or flattering and do not lend
themselves to the unicorn picture of a humane political system in which no
person wants for anything, neither free cell phone, an education, and two cars
in every garage. But the sources and roots of socialism are basically unknown
to modern advocates, who are genuinely ignorant and oblivious to what their
forerunners had in mind. They are asking for something the true and inevitable
nature of which they do not bother to examine in any depth other than quoting
Marxist “scripture” out of historical context and often out of the context of a
writer’s works.

Modern socialists are not holding fingers to their
lips and urging sotto voce, “Shush!
It’s really embarrassing what so many of our pioneer socialists said and did,
it’s best that this knowledge not get around! If people knew, it could harm the
cause!” No. They are utterly oblivious to the truth. Watson notes that, overall, modern Marxists “were
not just ignorant of the world. They were ignorant of Marx.” (p. 27)

In
1983, in one of his last books, Politics
of the Ancient World, [Moses] Finley rightly deplored the vulgar habit of
calling all class analysis Marxist, since, he said, it is in fact at least as
old as Aristotle.

Socialism as an articulated, propagated cause,
therefore, did not start with the publication of The
Communist Manifesto (1848) or with Das
Capital (1867). It had been growing long in the tooth for decades, even
centuries before Marx was even born. Watson, a British Liberal, in his Preface,
writes:

The
literature of socialism is lost in the sense that it is unread….A lost
literature is still a literature, after all, whether it survives in books, periodicals,
or manuscripts, and it is the business of the literary historian to read it….

There
is abundant evidence…that socialism was not always supposed to be left-wing or
favorable to the poor, whether by its adherents or its opponents. It was not
anti-racialist…and not always in favor of the welfare state.

Why have they not been heralded? Why have these
classic works been ignored, that is, ignored in the sense that they are known
and contain inconvenient ideas, not because they are known but snubbed and
given short shrift? In the main, most advocates of socialism today do not
understand what it is they are advocating. It is because Watson, in researching
the sources and foundations of socialism and socialist thought, realized that
most of the big names in the history of the development of socialist ideology
were, practically to a man, conservatives!

That is, they wished to preserve the status quo of
an elite cadre that governs men and disposes of their lives and property. They
wished to have the power of Mandrake the Magigian to appropriate the wealth
created by capitalism and create a new social order based on collectivism using
that wealth, with themselves as the governing class above everyone else.

The vision they commonly held was one that projected
an “idyllic” Medieval era, when knights jousted on brave steeds, the elite held
court and ate well, and the general population existed at subsistence level or was
locked into a guild socialism mosaic of trades and crafts, never to dream of
leaving their assigned stations in life or aspiring to leave their allotted
status as yeomen and servants for the privileged.

The Kennedy clan can be said to be the first
full-fledged realization of a self-perpetuating aristocracy that lorded it over
the rest of us. It was Joseph Kennedy, Sr.’s intent that his family should
rule, and rule in the literal sense of the word, a rule that bought off the
populace with socialist bromides and platitudes to placate the hoi polloi and plebeians with
legislative crumbs.

There isn’t a howling socialist demonstrator or
candidate for political office who does not
want to be in that elite, from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Paul Ryan, and
virtually every Democrat and Republican. They want to preserve the status quo
so that they can rule, and rule from the vantage point of privilege and
empowerment. The “revolution” they want to ignite is not a drive to higher
heights of social organization, but a revolving door that puts them back in
power, after some messy “revolutionary” disturbances, as the privileged class,
insulated from the travails they impose on the population at large.

Until Karl Marx came along, socialists who predated
him thought of socialism in terms of rank,
not class.The difference between rank
and class is purely “social,” and has little to do with “class warfare” or the
evolution of capitalism to an ideal social state. Rank implies that one knows
one’s place in society. You take orders, do what’s expected of you, and never
presume to tell the next person up the ladder his business.

A promotional flyer for Watson’s book reads and
captures the tenor of Watson’s opus:

…Watson
examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say:
the result is blasphemy against socialism and against socialism’s canon of
saints. Marx and Engels publicly advocated genocide in 1849; Ruskin called
himself a violent Tory….and [George Bernard] Shaw held the working classes in
utter contempt. Drawing on an impressive range of sources from Robert Own to
Ken Livingstone, the author demonstrates that socialism was a conservative,
nostalgic reaction to the radicalism of capitalism, and not always supposed to
be advantageous to the poor….Two chapters…study Hitler’s claim that the whole
of National Socialism [Nazism] was based on Marx, and bring to light the common
theoretical basis of the beliefs of Stalin and Hitler which lead to death
camps. As a literary critic, Watson’s concern is to pay proper respect to the
works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say and not
to what their modern disciples wish they had said….

Here is a sampling of what the “ancients” of
socialism said. In 1862, John Ruskin (1810-1900), an art critic and essayist, and
virulently opposed to the Industrial Revolution, published Unto
This Last. Watson writes:

Whether
medieval, Neolithic, or Paleolithic, socialism was from its origins a
hierarchical doctrine, and it habitually venerated aristocracy and leadership. “My
continual aim,” Ruskin wrote in Unto This
Last,

...has
been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of
one man to all others; and to show also the advisability of appointing such
person or persons to guide, to lead, or on occasion even to compel and subdue,
their inferiors according to their own better knowledge and wider will” (paragraph
54).

Those
who have wondered why, in practice, socialists can be so snobbish may have
their answer here. They were not snobs in spite of being socialists…but
socialists because they were snobs. Capitalism, after all, is radically vulgar…and
it can give spending power to the most dreadful people. (p. 48)

I may be an upper class twit, but I own you.

I do not know if Ruskin ever killed anyone, but
V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) killed on a mass scale once the Bolshevik government was
established in 1917. Yet, he hailed from the Russian aristocracy. His father
was made an hereditary nobleman for his work in education. Lenin, for all his
hard-scrabble revolutionary activities and periods of imprisonment and exile,
had aristocratic pretensions. Watson sheds some light on Lenin’s aims:

The
principle of socialist aristocracy was candidly announced by Lenin fifteen
years before he seized power, and in What
Is to Be Done?, a pamphlet written in exile, he put a blunt case for
the rule of an intellectual elite….Lenin’s argument is uncompromising. Since
Marxist revolution is based on theory, and only intellectuals can understand
theory, only an intellectual elite can lead the revolution: “the educated
representatives of the propertied class, the intelligentsia.” (pp. 48-49)

The chief and overriding end of Lenin’s crusade
against the Romanoffs and aristocracy was to replace them in fact and in
political practice with Lenin and his commissars (and their successors). This is
what happened. Soviet Russia, for over half a century, was ruled by a
self-perpetuating aristocracy.

Socialism
necessarily means government by a privileged class, as Lenin saw, since only
those of privileged education are capable of planning and governing. [George
Bernard] Shaw and H.G. Wells [both British Fabians], too, often derided the
notion that ordinary people can be trusted with political choice….Socialism had
to be based on privilege…since only privilege educates for the due exercise of
centralized power in a planned economy….The next step was for the ruling elites
of the socialist world to grant themselves the privileges, sometimes even
hereditary privileges of a ruling caste. (p. 49)

On pages 62 and 63, Watson provides an note about
the origin of key terms:

Socialism
was first used as a term by Robert Owen in the “Cooperative Magazine” in 1827;
and it was an English Christian Socialist, Goodwyn Barnby, who claimed in 1848
to have invented the word “communism” in Paris in 1840.

Watson cites numerous “unknown” advocates or
critics of socialism throughout The Lost
Literature, among them Alfred Sudre, a French lawyer and writer who
published, in 1848, Histoire
du Communisme.

Its subtitle was “an historical refutation of
socialist utopias.’ Sudre opposed socialism and communism. He wrote that
private property was the best defense of the poor against oppression by a stratified
communist or socialist aristocratic establishment. Watson writes of Sudre that
he averred that

The
liberating claims of socialism…however sincere, are a chimera, and the nation
that places economic power in the hands of a central authority, Sudre argues,
will end with a tyranny like Plato’s guardians, ruled by fear and military
discipline. It was the commitment of political thinkers in antiquity to the
concept of a perfect state that led them into the monstrous errors that now
threaten mankind, and Sudre was the first to notice how deeply indebted the
early socialist thinkers were to the heritage of ancient philosophy, though his
target was not Aristotle, who inspired Marx, but Aristotle’s master, Plato.

Sudre, writes Watson, was more radical than
traditionalist, radical in the sense that he saw free enterprise and private
property as a defense against socialist tyranny.

His
case is both theoretical and practical. The real charge against communism is
that, whatever its motives, its effects would be to create a privileged caste. It
is more conservative, as an idea, than any group or party which, in a
democratic age, chooses to call itself that. (p. 66)

Watson’s discourse is replete with discussions of
obscure writers and excerpts from their works, pro and con socialism. Sudre,
John Millar, David Hume, William Morris, Marx, Engels, and so on. It was not so
startling, for example, to read that Hitler was first and foremost a socialist
(thus the name of his Nazi party, the National
Socialist German Workers' Party), but he was willing to allow some free
enterprise in order to prop up his command economy. The striking thing is that,
while he maintained a lifelong enmity for socialists and communists, he
admitted in private that he and Nazism were indebted to Marx and Marxism –
including the means to exterminate whole races as Stalin could, except he claimed
that the Nazis were more efficient at it.

I highly recommend Watson’s The Lost Literature of
Socialism, especially to those socialists among us who wish to redistribute our
lives, our property, and our futures. As a friend who has read it remarked, “there
is a nugget on every page.” Socialists who heed my recommendation, however, may
need to recalibrate their political philosophy.

3 comments:

It is always a pleasure to see when one of our titles has been reviewed, especially if it is a favourable review! This is a particularly timely review as it is my pleasure to inform you that we will be making The Lost Literature of Socialism available in ebook Formats. On the 30/06/2016 the book will be published in PDF, ePub and Kindle formats.

Thank you for informing us of the review and I hope you will find more of our titles to your liking.

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.